Element 119
Website and A/V production for a hard rock cover band I'm in.
The Challenge
The Problem
Element 119 needed a web presence and consistent A/V quality for promo materials, but it was on a broke musician budget.
Why I Took This On
I'm the tech guy in the band. Also, I wanted our stuff to look professional without paying professional prices.
Constraints
Zero budget beyond gear I already owned. Had to work around everyone's day job schedules.
The Process
Initial Approach
Built a simple site first, then started documenting shows with video and photos for content.
What Went Wrong
Early recordings sounded terrible—turns out live sound and recording are completely different disciplines.
Breakthroughs
Figured out a hybrid recording setup that captures the board mix plus room mics, which solved 90% of the audio quality issues.
What I Learned
Skills Gained
Unexpected Discoveries
Marketing a band is basically content marketing with louder guitars.
What I'd Do Differently
Would have set up proper recording from day one instead of trying to salvage phone videos.
Where It Stands Now
Current State
Site's live, we gig regularly, and I've built out a decent archive of show recordings.
What's Next
Working on a proper live recording setup for higher-quality releases.
The Bigger Picture
The production skills transfer directly to the venue work. Same tools, different scale.
The Impact
Personal Impact
Keeps my performance chops sharp and gives me a creative outlet outside of client work.
Build Log
Shipped a tabbed admin manager for press photos and behind-the-scenes shots. The band can now reorder the EPK gallery directly without touching Sanity Studio.
Added a private-events flag so the band can keep corporate and wedding bookings off the public schedule while still featuring them on the EPK for prospective promoters.
Migrated Element 119's admin panel onto the canonical sanity-admin-kit, replacing free-form venue strings with a structured venue doctype. The band now edits each venue once and every show page picks up the change.
Documented the three-layer cache fix as a project Gotchas section with a reusable diagnostic trick, so the next person touching the admin panel doesn't rediscover the problem from scratch.
Peeled back three stacked cache layers in the admin panel to restore fresh reads: Next.js Full Route Cache, Sanity CDN, and Next.js Data Cache each needed their own opt-out before the list would reflect what was actually in Sanity.
Traced an admin panel 'duplicate bug' back to its real cause by comparing Sanity document ID formats. Two people editing through different tools produced the pair — not a broken edit flow.
Built a complete password-protected admin panel with CRUD for shows, photos, media, and hero slider management. Includes edge middleware auth, Cloudinary bulk uploads, and route group architecture separating public and admin concerns.
